Mary Kate Morris painted these circles on the Scenic Street side of her house on the northeast corner of Cedar and Scenic. The circles are inspired by the art of Friedensreich Hundertwasser.  My now-retired doctor Alan Greenbaum had Hundertwasser prints in his office.  I ran into somebody who remembered that not long ago.  I didn’t notice it for years, and then I did.

Many of my Quirky Berkeley posts have back stories.  Some don’t and are mostly just images.  Such is the case here. Photographs of painted garage doors.  They speak for themselves.

Remember – if you click on a photo you will get it full screen.  Not everyone remembers this.  Full screen they rock in a way that 720 pixels wide doesn’t.

Conny Bleul’s driveway/garage on Marin.

Even Berkeley businesses get in on painted garage doors.  Here are a couple:

Hida’s hand tools are the best, the very best.  I have fond memories of one particular Hida saw.

There you have it – a dozen plus two painted garage doors.

For me, garages are often magic.  Clutter and treasures.  The combination of smells in a wooden garage with steel garden equipment and decaying grass clippings and gasoline or kerosene – an extremely powerful scent memory, reminding of my grandmother Dami’s garage in Bryn Mawr.  Smells get routed through your olfactory bulb, the smell-analyzing region in your brain. It’s closely connected to your amygdala and hippocampus, brain regions that handle memory and emotion. My love of the smell of garages is thus physiologically sound.

But this is about painted doors, not the scent of the garage.

I love that among us are those who would be so bold as to paint their garage doors.

When I showed the photos to my friend, he allowed as how it struck him that missing from the scene here are aerosol/spray-painted or graffiti-style garage doors.

I reminded him of the garage walls at 1187 Arch, which had graffiti style murals before the garage was rebuilt.  “We’re talking garage doors,” he said.   “Walls don’t count.”

He wanted to know – why not a garage door along these lines?  “I heard someone contemplating this the other day.  Pure, brilliant idea.  Whoever you are, do it!  It’s not without danger, but it’s good being first.  Why not?  Go ahead, create a small wonder.”

I approve of his using this forum to encourage creative expression and to recognize those who dare.  I told him this, and then I asked my for his opinion on the painted garage doors that I collected.